So, after looking through the teams league by league and seeing a variety of differences, I can now move onto more general splits – I should caveat this by mentioning that it only applies to Europe’s ‘Top Five’ leagues, a grouping which rather ignores Portugal’s Primeira Liga, which often represents well in the Europa League, and the Eredivisie, which is rather less forceful at UEFA level.

The first split that might make sense is the competition itself. If a team is in the Champions League, are they likely to struggle more than in the Europa League; certainly, the latter competition is blamed for a lot of teams’ poor form, and, well, looking at the graphs previously, it tended to be teams that were EL based who endured the worst disparity.

In short, no. Teams in the EL are poorer – but we already knew that – but both competitions have a slightly negative effect overall on the league games that follow their involvement. In both cases, that gap represents around 1/10 of a point and balances out at around 3 points a season.

On that basis, if you have an option of qualifying for either, it shouldn’t negatively affect your next season if you end up in the Europa League instead of the Champions League.

Italy now, and another graph that raises more questions than it answers.

Juventus and Roma are unaffected by their involvement, but Napoli and Fiorentina both look to play better AFTER Europa League games than otherwise – Rafa and his tinkering. Torino, meanwhile, got absolutely crushed by their Europa League involvement.

The addition of Sampdoria and Lazio to these numbers next season will be worth noting – particularly in contrast with Genoa. As their disallowal from competing isn’t purely a financial thing, one can assume that they should be able to strengthen over the summer (if without the European draw), so in theory, they should be just as good next season as this.

Torino, you see, were hugely hampered by the campaign in Europe. Will be one of next season’s ‘teams to watch’, I think. But then I think that anyway.

I think this is quite an interesting one. Manchester City and Chelsea are negatively affected by European football, while Liverpool and Arsenal’s difference was barely perceptible. Does that indicate that the first two concentrate on Europe and let the Premier League take care of itself, safe in the knowledge they’re good enough to?

It should be noted that the league and the virtual league don’t show a lot of difference, though the case of Hull is an interesting one. Their two post-European games brought a draw and a defeat…

…not to say they’d have stayed up without them, but its interesting never the less.